Strasbourg, 19/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - The European Parliament has given its approval to €30 billion from the European budget to fund major infrastructure projects over the next seven years through a new financial instrument, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF).
Following on from the vote on the multiannual financial framework 2014-2020, MEPs approved (583 for, 91 against, with 17 abstentions) the funding envelope, which will be mainly used to fund cross-border energy network (€5.12 billion), telecommunications (€1 billion) and transport (€23.17 billion) links.
In a separate vote, they also approved guidelines for developing the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) (546 for, 104 against, 41 abstentions).
The €29.3 billion (2011 prices) will made available for the first time in a common pot for European infrastructure, under by a single financial instrument. Priority will be given to investments with added European value, particularly with regard to their cross-border dimension or ability to remove bottlenecks. Adina Ioana Valean (ALDE, Romania), rapporteur on the funding of energy and telecommunications networks said that “this new funding instrument is potentially a real revolution”. The rapporteur added that the connecting facility coul, “multiply many times the funds initially made available”.
Transport will take the lion's share of funding: the funding available for infrastructure in the 2014-2020 period is almost three times as much as that for the current programming period coming to an end (2007-2013). This can be explained by the fact that €10 billion comes from cohesion funds. This funding will remain available to cohesion member states, and they will be able to benefit from them through national funding until 2016. Transport projects financed through cohesion funds in the CEF will benefit from co-financing rates of 85%.
On the same day, the EP adopted approaches for developing the TEN-T. These guidelines include the setting up of a core network by 2013, made up of nine multimodal corridors covering at least two cross-border sections by 2030 and a core network connecting the rest of Europe to the central network by 2050. These guidelines promote the selection of transport projects funded through the CEF. A list of priority projects has already been included in the annex. With such a basis now developed, the co-rapporteur on the dossier, Ismail Ertug (S&D, Germany), welcomed “a genuinely European approach to transport finance and development, instead of the current patchwork of national approaches”. (MD/transl.fl)